


Transcription

by Tippet



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Standard Winter Soldier Warnings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-20
Updated: 2016-08-21
Packaged: 2018-07-25 14:57:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7537198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tippet/pseuds/Tippet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The day he goes under is the kind of day that reminds him of the lip of a breaking wave.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_Bucky_

The day he goes under is the kind of day that reminds him of the lip of a breaking wave. Streaks of cloud bundle and warp the sky; the scent of incoming rain permeates the grounds. Before breakfast, T’Challa pulls him aside into a private study and tries to talk him out of his decision, looks at him with an even, weighty regard. Bucky knows: he owes the king his life. But he will not be swayed.

He says, softly, “Steve can’t know. He'll need time. He'll be angry. I'll write a letter explaining some of it.”

“Given time, I feel confident that our deprogramming efforts—”

“Extraction, not preservation,” Bucky says, voice hard. “You gave me your word.”

T’Challa gets up and begins to pace, agitated. What is left of Bucky’s arm begins to ache a little.

“Extraction, not preservation,” T’Challa repeats. “I counsel against this again, James Barnes. At the very least, the gravity of these words is such that they merit reexamination.”

Bucky takes a breath that feels and sounds a little like it’s raking along glass. He exhales. Takes another. He does not want to talk through this again.

“I need,” he says, wetting his lips. He chooses his words with care. “I want time. Losing years while your scientists deliberate over what to keep and what to wipe—I won’t. Take it all.”

T’Challa regards him for a long, weighty moment. Bucky wonders what he sees. He has gained weight since being in Wakanda. He has taken many walks around the grounds. He has learned more about what it means to be human.

“I will do as I have promised,” T’Challa says finally, “out of the respect and debt I bear you.”

He exhales, deep. T’Challa’s eyes are dark and inscrutable when Bucky reaches into his jacket and takes out a black notebook from a cleverly concealed pocket. The book fits just right in his palm. It is one of the few possessions that he brought over from Bucharest. He wonders if T’Challa has been monitoring the cameras placed in their rooms, if he has seen the way Bucky has spent every night writing in it by lamplight, sleepless and wired. Forcing himself to remember. The act of transcription has consumed him nightly; it has left ink stains on his fingers and a tightness in his sternum.

He presses the book now into T’Challa’s hands and feels the base of his ribs wrench in protest; he puts his hands in his pockets so he won’t tear it back out of T’Challa’s grip.

“Please give me this notebook when I come out on the other side,” Bucky says, feeling the words run together in their rush to come out and slowing each word deliberately. “It’s important.”

T’Challa does not move to open the notebook. “James Barnes,” he says, at length. “Let us say that I understand.”

Bucky lifts his head to match T’Challa’s line of gaze. He feels a shiver of something he thinks he can name as pride. “Thank you,” he says, and his voice doesn’t shake at all when he corrects him: “Please—call me Bucky.”

 

 

When it is time, T’Challa nods at him from across the glass. Bucky settles into the chair.

“Are you sure about this?” Steve asks him. He can’t seem to look at Bucky for more than a few bare, snatched seconds at a time. His face is a thunderclap of pain.

Bucky closes his eyes against it, thinks instead about how he has spent these last few weeks getting used to these people who treat him like he is one of them. How the blood in every vein thrilled at the clarity with which he walked through the waking life, at the way the murkiness in his mind ebbed away to leave something cleaner and sharper behind.

He thinks of the sick swoop of terror whenever he thinks about the word _желание_. How one time, the archer called Clint said the word _longing_ in English when talking about his children and Bucky shattered the bowls he was holding; how long it had taken Steve to talk him out of the sear of disorientation, leading him by a gentle hand back into reality.

He thinks about Steve and what it has cost them to come to this point.

All is not lost. There is the notebook. He will not allow his resolve to crack.

He opens his eyes, looks straight at Steve. He is sure.

 

 

 _This is the last time_ , he thinks. His eyes are hurting. He thinks there may be wetness on his cheeks. He counts backwards in twos as the frost curls on the glass before him, cloying and familiar. He breathes.

_Ten – eight – six – four – two –_

 

 

* * *

**Transcription**  
n. the act of transferring to another medium

* * *

 

 

_Steve_

It is bright outside the aircraft.

The sun swells hot and high in the sky; the window across from Steve lets in a lancing light that floods through the compartment. It takes him a little while to put a finger on what is grating at him: the orderly by his side is observing him too closely for his liking. Months of seclusion have rendered him unused to the scrutiny of others. He puts his forehead in his hands now, willing away a headache. He feels the ground rumble beneath his feet. T’Challa has sent for him in a cloaked rotorcraft instead of the Quinjet. The flight stretches on.

He goes over the facts again.

Fact: This week marks 18 months since Sokovia.

Fact: T’Challa’s scientists have found a way to reverse the work done by Hydra and bring Bucky out of cryo. Something called transcranial magnetic stimulation, a procedure capable of producing a complete wipe. Indiscriminate. No way of knowing what will be spared, though the scientists somehow state with certainty that the Hydra programming will be obliterated.

Fact: Before he had gone under, Bucky had authorized T’Challa to perform the procedure the moment it was viable. Bucky is out of cryo now. They read him the activation words. He did not react. Strong vitals, no obvious signs of trauma. This information has been kept from him for one week.

At this last thought, Steve stirs out of stasis and pulls out the letter that had arrived by courier last night. He turns a little, re-reading the contents.

 _Steve_ , it says in Bucky’s hand, script spiky and a little raised in spots, like he couldn’t get the pressure of pen to paper quite right. _If you’re reading this it means they found a way to get Hydra out of my head. I told them to do it at any cost. I’m sorry I didn’t give you more warning. I’m sorry I had T’Challa keep it from you. This is what I want. I’ll be seeing you. Bucky._

The orderly glances at him and he realizes that the hands gripping the letter are quivering.

He casts his thoughts to safer ground. It is fall now, almost time for the leaves to change color. He will have to remember to change the clocks soon. He concentrates on his breathing. The shaking stops.

  

 

Some interminable stretch of time later, Steve is on solid ground again, being shepherded through the grounds and into one of the many labyrinthine corridors of the Wakandan compound. The agents who flank him are preternaturally calm, dressed in vibrant, expensive-looking robes that sweep the ground as they move through the halls.

They do not take the hallway that would take them to the shared living space. They do not take the left fork that would take them to the medical wing. After a while, Steve loses track of where they are and smiles faintly at the recognition that he had not appreciated the scale of this compound when he called this place a temporary home base, not like he should have.

Finally, the agents pause at a room to which Steve has never been granted access and the door slides open when they key in their credentials. The corridors in the next wing are lined with plush, intricately embroidered tapestries. They are walking a little faster now, he is sure of it. In his periphery, he catches glimpses of sitting rooms and balconies, too numerous to count. Sparrows flutter to bird baths, song trilling over and through the open windows.

At the end of the hallway, the head guard stops and waves him forward into a library. Steve nods appreciatively at the room that opens up in front of him: the familiar whiff of a well-stocked study, luxurious carpeting, high ceilings, floor to ceiling windows, and—

T’Challa sitting at a table, Bucky at his side dressed in soft, draping fabric the color of rust.

The sight of Bucky cuts Steve to the quick, shock driving deep into him and distilling into knife-points; Steve feels it root him to the ground where he’s standing. The grief and waiting and longing of the last year surge to the surface now, unchecked. He is straining for air. He does not know how he is staying upright under the weight and glory that is Bucky Barnes, here, whole.

Bucky is dwarfed by the biggest armchair Steve has ever seen, small and curled around a black notebook with his head dipped in concentration. His hair swings forward, covering most of his face. His feet are bare and pale. He is here, Steve thinks. He is here.

When T’Challa gets to his feet with a nod, Bucky looks up with a frown and holds Steve’s stare, serious and regarding. His gaze is blank, void of recognition. The knives in Steve twist all at once. He cannot help it: he waits and waits for Bucky’s expression to change, to ease into a smile with realization. 

The crease between Bucky’s eyebrows just deepens. Something inside Steve cracks. The pieces separate. A chasm stretches between.

“Captain,” T’Challa says, breaking cleanly through the silence. “Welcome. I know you must have many questions.”

Steve swallows, forces breath into his lungs. But when he opens his mouth, there is no air with which to speak, only a terrible sort of fey cry that is trying to claw its way out of his throat. Steve forces it down. Bucky is watching him.

There is a long, taut silence. Then, Bucky’s grip tightens around the black notebook in his lap and almost imperceptibly, something pulls taut and changes in his expression, like stray notes resolving into song.

“Steve Rogers,” Bucky says, voice rough with disuse. The sound of his name in Bucky’s mouth is round, uncertain.

Steve cannot speak. Steve cannot breathe.

“I know who you are,” says Bucky, after glancing at T’Challa for confirmation. “Steve Rogers,” he says again.

“That’s right,” he manages at last. “It’s me.”

When T’Challa offers Steve a seat in a nearby armchair, Steve takes it and his knees buckle like they can’t take the weight of his body.

Bucky stares at him like he’s trying to figure him out, and Steve makes himself go completely still. He lets Bucky take his time, Bucky, whose eyes take methodical inventory of Steve’s appearance, flickering from his face to his torso to his limbs. His gaze lingers long somewhere on Steve’s chest, and Steve wonders wildly if Bucky can hear the way his heart is throwing itself against his ribcage.

Then a shiver moves visibly over Bucky and he looks away and into his notebook; Steve quells the sudden rush of pain and moves a hand over his face.

 

 

This is what he holds onto:

“What, um. Do you remember?” Steve asks cautiously, when T’Challa has left the room to bring them tea after filling him in on the specifics of the procedure.

Bucky, who had been listening in with a detached expression, lifts his head to look at Steve.

“My name,” he says. His voice is quiet, clear. “Bucky.”


	2. Chapter 2

_Bucky_

The man named Steve Rogers—Steve—takes him to a house on the outskirts of Washington D.C. on its own plot of hilly, forested land.

On the flight, he looks at Bucky with concern and is careful not to touch him. He is careful with his words. Careful with his hands which twist and twist in his lap. So careful that the alien desire to grit at him to stop solidifies into a mass at the base of Bucky’s throat. He turns from Steve’s gaze, pinned under the weight of it and all it implies.

He does not know what to do about it. He thinks he may regret leaving Wakanda. The direct aftermath of the procedure is a blur, but afterward the king had found him, given him the notebook and left him largely alone in a suite after that until Bucky had sought him out again.

The notebook. Bucky resists the urge to consult the notebook now, keeps his eyes trained forward on the window overlooking the clouds. He has thumbed to the pages containing information about this man more than any other section in the notebook. When he closes his eyes, he sees the content of the pages in his mind.

A faded and creased photograph of Steve with his arm around Bucky, taped on the left. A series of printed excerpts stapled on the right about Steve Rogers’ history with the Howling Commandos and activity as Captain America. A handwritten account (in his own hand) of the life that Steve and Bucky shared as adolescents. In shakier penmanship, a terse but thorough entry of Steve Rogers as the Winter Soldier’s mission. Two lines underlined and highlighted in fluorescent yellow: _He will want to help you remember. Let him._

 

 

When the aircraft lands, Steve makes a motion like he is going to help Bucky out and then aborts the gesture halfway; his arm hangs for an uncomfortable moment before he tucks it into his side. He settles for standing a couple of paces next to Bucky when he climbs outside.

The clearing is surrounded by a copse of trees, denser at the outskirts. Sunlight dapples the ground in patches here and there; it catches on a motorcycle parked near a simple, unassuming house with many windows and Bucky squints at the glare. He walks around a little and tries not to step on the pale, spindly looking wildflowers sprawling over the earth. The air is crisp, clean, something mysterious and loamy beneath; Bucky breathes deep and feels something shutter open in his chest.

“It isn’t much,” Steve says behind him, a little awkwardly, “but it’s safe here.”

“No, this is good,” Bucky says. “Steve,” he tacks on. At this, Steve smiles and it softens his entire body; the pleasure radiates from him.

The interior of the house itself is spacious and airy. Bucky walks in and the carpet moves beneath his feet, soft and plush. The furnishings are modest, sensible, earth-toned. There are coasters everywhere. It is a house that suits Steve. He does not know how he knows this, but the thought has a denseness behind it that he has started associating with truth.

Steve presses fresh blankets and a change of clothes into his arms and leads him to a guest bedroom with a skylight in it. There is a restroom attached to the main space; Steve hovers uncertainly and tells him that he’s stocked the bath with soap and shampoo. He is in constant motion—walking around, pointing things out, looking to Bucky for a response, turning his quietly earnest face to him like Bucky is the sun. Bucky has read Steve’s file. He wonders how such a man can be an effective field agent when he wears his heart so plainly on his sleeve; he can see it written all over the lines of Steve’s face, the longing for closeness. He wonders what Steve sees when he looks at him. He cannot give him what he is looking for. He does not have enough of it to give. He does not even know what _it_ is.

When Steve says something about getting lunch started and leaves the room, Bucky lets the silence settle over him, cool and heavy like a quilt. He breathes. Then, he empties out his backpack onto the bedspread and arranges the contents in the bedside drawer. A cell phone, untraceable. A notebook. A pencil pouch. A baseball cap.

The clothes that he changes into are soft and worn-in, like the man who has given them to him. He studies himself in the mirror. The shirt is only a little big on him, and the pants fit well enough once he fastens the elastic around his waist. When he opens the drawer by the bed, he sees stacks of folded t-shirts in muted colors and an assortment of pants. He thinks about Steve selecting these clothes for him. An emotion he cannot name surfaces. He spends several minutes trying to identify it, then puts the thought away for later.

  

 

When he walks into the kitchen, Steve turns from where he’s washing lettuce at the sink and his entire face goes tender at the sight of Bucky in his new-old clothes; Bucky flinches a little and has to keep himself from turning away. The table is set already. There is a chair that is clearly meant for him, so he takes a seat and then Steve seems to realize he's staring a little because he turns around with what looks like visible effort and starts pulling plates out from the cupboard.

Steve asks him what he wants to eat. The question stymies him. He has left his notebook in his room. He cannot remember the items on the list titled _food you like_. He thinks lasagna may have been on the list, but cannot remember if that is a thing that people have for lunch. His hand is stiff, curled around an empty cup. The knowledge is just there, beyond his grasp, if he could just. He is stuck. He is. Taking too long to answer.

“I don’t know,” he says. The words feel like they have been torn from him. He takes a breath in. Out.

Steve is moving around the kitchen, collecting bread and meat and cheese onto a large platter. His tone is light when he says, “Hope sandwiches are okay.”

Bucky looks down at the tablecloth, checkered beige and red. Normal. This is normal.

Steve says, "Hey." He sits down at the table with an easy smile that reaches his eyes and pours out two tall glasses of lemonade, pushing one over to Bucky. “Made with real lemons,” he says.

“Thank you,” Bucky says. “Steve.”

Steve’s smile grows wider. Bucky likes the way the paper-thin skin around Steve’s eyes creases. He does not know why. He thinks: perhaps he will uncover the reason if he keeps saying Steve's name.

Steve makes a roast beef sandwich for him. His tone is light as he works; he says, Bucky, the number of times I’ve fixed you this sandwich. He says, it’s your favorite. He says, Bucky, I’m glad you’re here.

Bucky takes a bite. It’s good, and he tells Steve so. This is the first piece of information he has uncovered about himself that hasn’t come from the notebook: he likes roast beef sandwiches. But the pickles don’t agree with him. When Steve gets up to bring more lemonade, he moves the pickles into his napkin and puts the paper wad into his pocket.

Steve makes him three more sandwiches. Bucky eats them all.

 

* * *

_Steve_

Steve knows that the situation with Bucky isn’t going to be the way it was before Bucky went into cryo, at least for a while. He knows that.

But this—this is something he was not ready for. He will never be ready for this, he thinks. Something hot and painful snares in his chest as he considers the way Bucky's eyes fix distantly on something beyond Steve’s perception. The way sometimes, he looks straight at Steve without seeing.

Bucky is quiet for hours at a time. Steve finds him in the living room when the door to his bedroom isn’t closed, taking up the smallest amount of space possible on the couch or on the rug in front of the big window. The sight of him crouching there with his knees drawn up makes something in Steve’s chest wrench. Bucky is silent, thoughtful, a curl of fabric swathed around sharp angles. Helplessness rises like a gorge in his throat when he realizes he cannot tell if Bucky is happy to be here. 

Sometimes Steve calls his name just to get Bucky to stir from where he’s been looking into his notebook. When Bucky lifts his head and matches Steve’s gaze with a faint question in the tilt of his head, the motion catches the sunlight, smoothing out the shadowy planes of his face.

The desire to look inside Bucky’s notebook lingers on the forefront of Steve’s thoughts at all times. Bucky is attached to the little book. He does not go anywhere in the house without it. It is a constant fixture, an extension of Bucky’s body. Every time Steve looks up, Bucky is peering into it or writing in it.

Steve doesn't know how to breach these new walls. He cannot think of a single thing more important to him than Bucky’s dignity; even he doesn't quite know the lengths to which he would go to protect it. So he just tightens his jaw and holds it together, even if it feels like a shot in the gut, the way Bucky keeps checking the notebook to answer things like _do you want an apple_.

“Yes,” Bucky says, after consulting his book. “I would. Steve.”

Bucky does that a lot, punctuates the ends of his sentences with Steve’s name. Every time he does, it feels like a drop of hot soup slips into Steve’s stomach, warm and satisfying. He cannot help the smile that steals over his face.

 

 

Days pass and Bucky says his name more and more confidently each time, like he is claiming his right to say it.

Slowly, by degrees, they figure out a conversation system that works. Steve gets the idea from Sam, who sometimes gets his patients at the VA to open up by having them vocalize “I like that” or “I don’t like that” when confronted with a given situation. When Steve brings up the idea during dinner, Bucky agrees to give it a try and things get a little better after that.

“I like this,” Bucky says, when Steve brings home a carton of mint chip ice cream from the grocery store one day.

Or once, when he looks over Steve’s shoulders at a charcoal sketch of Brooklyn he is working on, “That’s pretty good, Steve. I like that.”

Another time, Steve asks if Bucky would be interested in accompanying him to a ball game and Bucky goes white. His right hand worries at the sleeve covering his left and he takes a step back. Then: “No,” Bucky says, in a half-gasp. “Thank you. I would not like that.” When Steve nods and changes the topic, Bucky visibly relaxes. He does not turn away from Steve. He does not leave the room. Progress.

One of the things that Bucky seems to enjoy especially is Steve talking to him about his past.

“Tell me,” Bucky says, pinning Steve with an expectant look over coffee or when they’re watching something unimportant on the television.

“Your name is Bucky,” Steve says, smiling each time. Bucky knows the details already, but he does not mind repeating them. He will tell the story a hundred times if that is what it takes. “You were born on March 10.”

Bucky closes his eyes in the lamplight and settles back to listen.

Steve’s heartbeat quickens when he thinks about the progress they are making. They discover together that Bucky likes plums, classical music, the color blue. They learn that Bucky doesn’t like cabbages or being cold.

Bucky does not add these things to his notebook and when Steve asks why, he says in a matter-of-fact voice, “I don’t need to. These are new memories. They’ve already been tested.” 

 

* * *

_Bucky_

Bucky is practicing anchoring himself in the particulars.

His world shrinks to the soft blue blankets in his bedroom, the way the sun feels on his face in the early morning, the bowl of strawberries that Steve sets out every day for him.

Steve hands him fresh towels and Bucky lays them flat on his bed, admiring the way they have gone soft and frayed after too many washes. One day, he borrows a washboard from Steve one day and washes by hand the clothes he was wearing when he came. Relishes the feeling of hot, soapy water over his knuckles and wonders how long it will take for these clothes to become as soft and worn-in as Steve’s.

 

 

Steve is very gentle with him. Bucky hears Steve talking on the phone one morning with someone named Sam and that is how he learns that Steve uses a different voice when he’s speaking to Bucky. Softer. Rounder.

He is coming to enjoy spending time with Steve. Steve smiles when he sees Bucky. He smiles when Bucky says he likes something. He is smiling constantly, so much that Bucky wonders if his facial muscles ever hurt because of it.

He knows Steve has a lot of questions. When Steve doesn’t think Bucky is looking, he gets this look in his eyes like he is trying to catalogue every detail, or he is afraid that this will be the last time that he sees Bucky. But he leaves Bucky alone. He gives him his space. Bucky recognizes the concession for what it is.

Steve holds his mouth a little tighter every time he glances at the new arm that T’Challa had fitted Bucky with when he came out of cryo. The arm is fine. It does not hurt him. He tells Steve to get him to stop worrying, but the tightness doesn’t leave Steve’s jaw. He does not know what to do with it. He cannot reason out what it is that Steve needs.

When he comes to Steve, joining him on the couch or at the table, Steve goes very still. Like if he makes any sudden movements, Bucky will leave. 

Everything is moving too fast. Everything is moving too slow.

It makes Bucky’s head hurt to think about it.

 

  

“What do you know?” Steve asks him one night, all softness. “What do you remember?”

He tries to explain. The words are halting. “There are some things,” he says, “I know things sometimes without reading them in the notebook. But. I don’t always know what is remembering and what is newly knowing.”

He has been laboring and laboring to know the man named James Buchanan Barnes. He has spent every spare hour committing to memory the contents of the notebook, but there are mistakes in the pages sometimes and he does not know what to do with that. He does not like the color red. He does not prefer the darkness. He likes the blue of his blankets, and turning his face to the big window and closing his eyes to feel the warmth of sunlight. He chooses to sleep with the lights on.

A few days ago, Bucky came across a recent photograph of Steve, Sam Wilson, Natasha Romanoff and himself in Wakanda on one of Steve’s shelves and almost didn't recognize himself. He was missing an arm in the photo and the smile on his face was easy, lazy. He'd spent a whole hour in front of the mirror trying to figure out which muscles in his face he needed to use to get that same expression on his face. Steve had told a joke that dinner and when Bucky pulled the smile onto his face, he had known it was the right one because Steve had gone white and almost knocked over his drink. Then, a smile that Bucky had never seen before spread over Steve’s face, smoothing every frown line from Steve’s forehead and making his eyes go bright.

Bucky’s pulse quickens at the memory.

There is a long silence in which Steve struggles and fails to gain mastery over his emotions. When he finally speaks, his voice cracks in the middle of it. “Buck, you could,” he says, “maybe stop checking your notebook so much? We could… try to figure it out from here on out. Together.”

Steve does not understand. The notebook is for Steve as much as it is for Bucky.

“Okay,” he says, to make Steve stop hurting. He does not tell him that he has already memorized the contents of the notebook.

 

 

His past begins to find him in pieces.

One morning, Bucky wakes up realizing that he knows what Steve’s mother looks like. Looked like.

Another time, he is reading one of Steve’s encyclopedias on the back deck while Steve is grilling burgers. Steve says something about how he can have the last of the tomatoes and Bucky feels himself say, “I brought over a bag of tomatoes that one Thanksgiving.”

Steve’s mouth opens in a little ‘o’ of surprise. The burger he’s been trying to flip angles precariously on the grates, and Steve doesn’t notice. “That’s,” he says, in that slightly strained tone he uses when he’s trying for a normal voice, “that’s right, Buck. You did. Your parents were out of town, so Ma made us—”

“Spaghetti with hot dogs,” Bucky finishes in tandem with Steve. They look at each other over the grill. Steve gives him that special, bright-eyed smile. Bucky thinks he may be smiling back at him.

Steve asks Bucky to cut some onions for breakfast a few days after that and the moment he picks up the knife, his fingers conform to the handle and the air gets knocked from his lungs; he suddenly cannot breathe for the knowledge that there is a knife in his hand that he knows how to throw. He has held knives before to Steve's throat, he realizes. He has used them to kill. Steve takes one look at him and moves across the kitchen automatically, his large, gentle hand prying the kitchen knife from Bucky’s clenched fingers. When he sets it down, Bucky closes his eyes and has to steady himself on the counter to keep himself from stumbling.

He is a pebble tossing in a river, stripped of control. Memory takes over and he has no defense; it brings him stumbling to his knees. It is completely different from reading the Winter Soldier’s mission reports in his notebook. He presses the heels of his hands to his eyes, hard. Tries to close his inner eye to the memories crashing through him now—a target—an outpouring of blood—a cleanly snapped bone—he feels a dull scream gather in the pit of his stomach and clamps his mouth so it won’t come out. He doesn’t know if it works.

Steve’s hands are on his shoulders. Buck, Steve is saying. Bucky. Stay with me.

Come back, Steve’s voice says, and the animal desire to answer his call is a piercing pain, worse even than the agony of remembering; startling enough that it drags him out of his head and back into the sunny kitchen. He is sweating, gasping for breath in huge, erratic lungfuls. Cold. He is colder than he should be. He opens his eyes to see Steve looking into his face, features twisted in panic.

“Tell me,” he gasps.

“Your name,” Steve says immediately, “is Bucky.”

The notebook. The notebook. Bucky twists out of Steve’s grip and casts his vision around the kitchen until he sees it on the floor. Steve doesn’t say anything, just watches as Bucky picks it up and slams it open on the countertop, eyes going straight to the familiar slanted, bumpy script and drinking it in like he has been starved of it.

 

  

By the time Bucky has read himself back into reality, he looks up to see that Steve has draped a linen towel printed with small blue flowers around his shoulders.

An omelet waits for him on the table: a simple thing made from eggs, butter, onions, cheese. If he leaves it for too long, it will spoil.

His hands shake. Steve is in the next room, on the phone with his friend Sam.

He picks up the fork, begins to eat.


	3. Chapter 3

_Steve_

For three days after that Bucky stays in his room, denying meals and walks and Steve’s company.

The door to his bedroom stays resolutely shut and Steve tries not to take it personally. Sam tells him he needs to get his mind off of it and give Bucky his space, so he starts spending as much time as he can stand outside the house, making the drive into town and going on runs with Sam or painting in the park. _This is enjoyable_ , he tells himself. _This is fun._

The mantra sounds pretty half-hearted, even to him. He cannot get his mind off of Bucky. He wants to know what's going on; he wants to shake it out of him. It is almost worse than when he was on the road, searching for Bucky with a string of clues clutched in his fist. Bucky Barnes has always been the only person who can hollow him out like it’s nothing, carve him out with worry.

Steve spends three whole days walking around feeling like he is coming apart at the seams. 

On the fourth day, Bucky’s door creaks open and Steve goes very, very still. His blood stutters to a halt; he is holding his breath. When Bucky’s door clicks shut and footsteps sound in the hallway, Steve puts down the knife he’s been using to cut grapefruit and uses every degree of stealth he has in him to silently stow it away into the dishwasher, out of sight.

Then Bucky shuffles into the kitchen looking wan and wary and Steve bites the inside of his cheek, schooling his expression into neutrality. Bucky has lost much of the weight he has put on in the last weeks. There are shadows beneath his eyes, accentuating the angular planes of his face. Steve imagines himself reaching out, smoothing out the edges with his fingers. He doesn’t move an inch.

“Bucky,” he says, mouth going dry at the way Bucky lifts his eyes at the call but waits there in the doorway, holding himself boulder-still. “Bucky, do you want some breakfast?”

There is a long, taut pause before Bucky gives a small nod and moves into the kitchen, eyes trained on the bowl of grapefruit.

“I can whip something up if you want to sit,” Steve says. His voice is doing something funny, sounding light and unconcerned. It’s better than the alternative, he thinks. Bucky nods again and pulls out a chair, lowers himself stiffly into it.

Steve turns around and cracks eggs into the red-lipped bowl, lays strips of bacon on the griddle on the highest heat. Bucky’s eyes follow him as he moves around the kitchen.

When he walks to the table with trays laden with food, Bucky is looking down at the table. 

Bucky continues to avoid eye contact when he says thank you, but he lets Steve pile his plate full of breakfast and place it in front of him. For a while, the only sounds are the clinking of cutlery against china. When Bucky empties his plate, Steve fills it again and he finishes that too without comment. Bucky eats in small, controlled bites, chewing thoroughly before swallowing. Steve watches him, a boulder in his throat as he thinks about the Bucky who would inhale his food at every meal. It's not—fair, he thinks. The thought skewers him.

They hit the bottom of the platter Steve has prepared in no time at all, and then Bucky is moving his fork around the empty plate in circles, face blank. The silence they sit in is at once companionable and fraught with all the things Steve wants to ask him. He presses the questions back, feels them strain at the back of his throat where he holds them.

When Steve reaches for Bucky’s empty glass to refill it, Bucky reaches out and lets his fingers hover right above Steve’s wrist, so close he can feel the heat coming off him. Steve stills at the movement and glances at Bucky, who looks straight at him for the first time all breakfast.

“Steve,” Bucky says, voice soft and sleep-scratchy. “I was thinking.”

“Yeah?”

There is a pause in which Bucky looks like he’s having second thoughts. “What is it, Buck?” Steve asks, voice as gentle as he can make it.

“This,” Bucky says at length, shifting in his seat to gesture at his hair, which has grown past his shoulders. “I don’t like this.”

The familiar words, there— _I don’t like this—_ and Steve feels relief bloom in his sternum, sweet and small. Bucky has remembered he exercise. Bucky is coming back to him.

“I can cut it,” Steve feels himself say automatically. He doesn’t know the first thing about cutting hair. The words pour out of him anyway. “I can do it how you used to like it. Fringe to the right, shorter on the sides.”

Bucky's expression darkens. “No. No. I don’t want it like that.”

“Okay,” he says quickly, looking into Bucky's face. “We’ll do it how you want. When? Now?”

Bucky nods, then looks unsure. “When you’re free,” he says.

“I’m free now,” Steve says.

So Steve sets Bucky up on the computer and Bucky spends fifteen minutes looking through images on Internet until he settles on a haircut he likes. Steve digs up a pair of crafting scissors from the drawer he uses to hold his art supplies and sets up a chair in the tiled kitchen. His hands tremble a little; he shakes them out, wipes them on his pants.

“Can you do it like this,” Bucky says a little while later, joining him in the kitchen. Steve summons up a grin and Bucky relaxes a little, pressing into Steve’s waiting hand a sheet of printer paper with a headshot of an olive-skinned man on it. 

Steve studies the paper and nods. Bucky gives him a small, crooked smile that makes his stomach flip. He takes a breath, slow and even. He does not say, Bucky, are you okay. He does not say, I was really worried about you.

The tablecloth Steve fixes around Bucky’s neck with a clothespin is the wrong kind of fabric and the hair kind of sticks to it, but Bucky doesn’t complain and just tilts his head back a little into the palm of Steve’s hand when Steve gets to work. It’s a little distracting how he has to lean in close; he thinks wildly that he can count every individual hair making up Bucky’s eyebrows and banishes the thought as quickly as it comes to him, going warm.

It is tricky work and he doesn’t really know what he’s doing, but thirty minutes and a hundred hesitant snips later, Steve steps back, scrutinizing his handiwork. He hands Bucky a mirror and Bucky is quiet for a long time as he examines his reflection. He has never worn his hair like this, Steve thinks, suddenly nervous. Bucky has never liked soft, curling haircuts like this. His hair is parted just left of the center, swept to either side and short enough that it leaves his forehead clear. The hair at his back is longer, curling at the ends. Bucky moves his hand into his hair, cards through the strands.

Then, he sets the mirror down on his lap. Steve tenses, but when Bucky turns around to look at Steve he is smiling at him.

“Steve,” he says, sounding surprised. “You did a good job. I like it a lot.”

“You do?” Steve says, thinking that he would do whatever it took to keep this expression on Bucky’s face, for ever. This is the first genuine smile he has gotten out of him; it is a warm and special and deliberate thing, a glowing ember.

“Yeah,” Bucky says, smile growing still. He looks into the mirror again, touching the hair near his nape. “It’s great. It’s what I wanted.”

The rest of the day, Bucky is quieter than usual but Steve catches Bucky absently touching his hair and it feels like his ribcage is too small to hold the gladness swelling up inside of him. The soft smile stays on Bucky’s face through dinner, and when Bucky thanks him again before going to bed, he touches Steve’s arm for a glancing moment and Steve thinks, _this is the first time he has touched me since he came here_.

The thought is sustaining, a balm. Steve holds fast to it.

 

* * *

_Bucky_

For three days the Winter Soldier’s memories crash through him like he is a hollow vessel made for the sole purpose and agony of filling. The knife is nothing, he realizes. He is—was—capable of weaponizing any item of his choice. He is a weapon himself. Was. Revulsion wells in him, deep and cloying.

He does not know how long he lies there, dumb and blind and thirsty. He recognizes dimly that he is in pain, the sort that can’t be pinpointed to a specific location on the body.

Eventually, the sharpness of hunger pulls him out of his stupor. When he moves to get up, his body is leaden with the memories occupying the whole of him, heavy and dark like stones. He spends thirty minutes forcing every screaming muscle to let him up. Drifts as if through water through the house with the high ceilings and large windows and then Steve is there, calling him to the breakfast table, a thing of gentleness and light itself.

Steve.

Steve’s hands anchor him back to this reality as they prepare breakfast, curl on the table, cut his hair. Steve calls his name and his whole body turns toward it in need. It is not quite instinct. It is as new as it is old. It is something he doesn’t understand.

 

 

Sometimes, Steve looks at him like it hurts him to do it. He does not ask him what Bucky was doing in the three days he spent locked in his room and Bucky does not want to tell him, so they don’t talk about it. Steve continues to look at him with wide, uncertain eyes and seems to settle for making Bucky consume overwhelming quantities of food.

Bucky does not know how to explain it, this ironclad heaviness. He does not like to sleep in his room anymore. He takes naps in the living room. 

Days pass. The task of knowing Steve becomes his mission; he slips and falls headlong into it.

He pushes away the weight and gravity of Before and lets Steve lead him into the present with his soft smiles and large hands. Steve, who places warm, thick blankets on his bed when the weather gets cold and builds crackling fires at night. Steve, who leaves piles of books in his bedroom, light-hearted stories about friendship and quests and heroes. When Bucky returns a book after finishing it, it is Steve who looks like Bucky has given him a gift.

The foods that Steve teaches Bucky to cook are simple, warm, comforting. They make their way together through casseroles and cobblers every night and Steve looks absurdly, nakedly touched every time Bucky offers to do the dishes.

In the late afternoon, they take walks in the forest and Steve recalls a name for every tree and plant in their path. Bucky listens to the recitation and closes his eyes. He only has to hear the names once to know them. He exults in the ease of learning.

“I like it when you do this,” he tells Steve once as Steve is teaching him about this particular strain of night jasmines. “When you tell me about plants.”

Steve beams at him, squeezes his shoulder. “I like having a listener,” he says, and Buck smiles back at him. The backs of their hands brush a little as they keep walking. Bucky doesn’t pull away.

Steve disappears every now and then on missions and Bucky waits for him, filling his time with reading or researching things on the Internet. The sounds of the front door opening, boots being toed off, Steve calling for him, voice bright with longing: these are noises Bucky begins to associate with home.

He practices being this man’s friend, practices and practices it until he feels like he is coming apart with the effort of it. Steve keeps telling him stories about what they did back in the day. Sometimes Bucky remembers and sometimes he doesn’t. The look that Steve gets in his eyes when Bucky repeats a small tidbit from one of the stories he’d told him makes something deep in Bucky wrench in all different directions.

It feels wrong, he thinks vaguely one day, wrong, wrong, wrong. The thought is a shapeless and bewildering thing. In attempting to name it, he withdraws from Steve for a few hours and that feels like a different kind of wrong, a sharp and piercing one that brings him sloping back to Steve’s side to join him in front of the fire.

He gets better at saying the right things at the right times. That special smile Bucky likes, the one that makes Steve’s eyes all bright, appears more and more frequently. If there is a murkiness behind the ease with which they carry their fellowship, Bucky ignores it and endeavors on. Sometimes he slips and becomes distant and cold, but Steve waits for him through the spells, looks at him without condemnation. Every inch of him radiates acceptance and Bucky simultaneously shrinks back and curls toward it. 

 

 

In the end, it comes down to this: Steve keeps making him sandwiches with pickles in them.

Steve is in the middle of telling a story about what had happened the last time he visited a record store in the city when Bucky puts down his sandwich after taking a bite, staring down at the plate in front of him. His fists tighten on the table.

“Steve.”

Steve takes one look at him and looks a little startled. Bucky does not know what his face must look like. He cannot control his expression. “Steve. I don’t like pickles.”

At this, Steve’s brow furrows in confusion. “What?” he says. “You always—”

“I don’t like pickles,” Bucky repeats, and it feels better than he could have imagined to voice such a small thing. To put a name to what has been lingering in the back of his mind. The words are so normal, to taste like such freedom.

“Okay,” Steve says, frowning still. “You should have said something before. I’ll take them out from now on.”

Steve is giving him that look that makes Bucky feel cold and small, all preternatural clarity and full of an understanding that Bucky hasn’t asked for. Bucky can see it in his face: he is thinking that this is another detail that Bucky hasn’t remembered yet, like the things that make up Bucky’s preferences are something to be uncovered. He is missing the point. He has been missing the point for a long time. The knowledge surges to the surface now, hot and choking.

“Stop it,” Bucky feels himself say in a low, tight voice. “I don’t like it.”

Steve looks confused. “What is it, Buck?” he says, softly. Too soft.

He is. He is losing control. He feels the carefully constructed skin he has placed around him begin to unfurl. Every ugly and uncertain thought that he has been suppressing is slamming against the surface, eager, begging.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Bucky says savagely. “Please,” he tacks on, when Steve freezes.

“Like what?” Steve asks. His voice is sad, soft. “I don’t understand.”

“I know you don't,” Bucky says, breathing a little faster. The words that come out of him next are halting and unexpectedly jagged with resentment. “You keep—looking at me like one day I’m going to wake up and go back to being—”

Steve has gone white. He grips Bucky’s hands. “No,” he breathes. “Buck, that’s not.”

“You look at me,” Bucky says, looking down at his hands, “like I’m your best friend—”

“You _are_ my best friend, Bucky.”

Bucky takes a deep, shaky breath. He forces his fingers to uncurl. Counts backwards from ten in twos.

“No. You don’t understand,” he says at length, looking straight into Steve’s eyes. “I have known you for two months.”

The silence that stretches between them is taut, humming with the things that Bucky should have brought up weeks ago. The words flutter where they wait, trapped beneath his collarbones. It is a burning sort of pressure, one that has been fighting for egress for too long.

Steve’s voice is very small when he says, “I’ve known you for almost a century.”

“No,” Bucky says, and stands up. “No.”

“Your memories—you’ll get there,” Steve says, so earnestly that Bucky wants to hold his face between his hands. He does not want to hurt him. “We can do it together.”

“You are not understanding me,” he forces himself to say. The effort of it tears at the muscle and sinew of his throat. “I will never get there.”

Steve is quiet for a long time. Bucky almost wishes Steve would stand up too, so he could look him in the eye instead of staring down at the halo of his bowed head.

Then: “When you get there, you will be there,” Steve says softly. “The distance is just in your head.”

“No. Steve. It is not a matter of distance. You have the destination wrong.”

Steve looks slapped. When he lifts his head to hold Bucky’s gaze, Bucky has to keep himself from flinching away.

“Bucky,” Steve says. The hand that he reaches out falters, then drops to the table when Bucky takes a step back.

There is a pleading sort of look in Steve's eyes, but Bucky makes himself hard, unyielding. He is stone. He will not be moved.

“I would like,” he feels himself say, “some space.”

They are words that he’s heard on the television. Maybe, he thinks, that is why they feel so cumbersome on his tongue.

“Space,” Steve echoes. He swallows, lets out a shaky breath. Bucky feels something in him twist, hard. “Okay,” Steve says.

Steve stays sitting at the table; Bucky moves in steps that land surer than he feels, carrying him away from Steve in degrees. He is not sure how he is moving but his body is doing it and he is grateful for it.

He makes it all the way to his bedroom before the impact of what had just happened makes itself known, and then it is an all-pervasive understanding, what he has done. He braces himself for the crushing weight of it, but instead he finds himself sitting there in his too-large bed with the soft sheets, thinking he is weightless, he is weightless, he is free.


	4. Chapter 4

_Steve_

The Bucky staring at him from across the table is—he does not know how to engage this Bucky, doesn’t know what to do with this man with the soft, curling hair and the jaw tight with unhappiness.

He has been fixing Bucky sandwiches for two months. Almost a hundred years, depending on who’s counting. It feels ridiculous now, to be fighting over something like this after everything that's happened to and between them—but here they are, Bucky visibly trembling with frustration, fists curled tight. The words rise on Steve’s lips: _but you always liked them_ ; Bucky cuts him off savagely and then suddenly it isn’t about sandwiches anymore, it’s about something else entirely that Steve does not understand.

Bucky’s face is a stormcloud, ominous and darkening with the words that slip like knives out of his mouth and into Steve’s ribs. Steve says all the right things but Bucky’s voice just escalates and then it becomes searingly, painfully obvious that Bucky is hearing them all wrong and Steve is not sure what to do with this information; this is new territory, this is awful, this is so far removed from the normalcy they have been enjoying and he is blindsided, he is saying—what is he saying? He hears Bucky mumble that he would like some space. Steve feels himself say back, dumbly, “Okay.”

The entire conversation has taken five minutes. Bucky’s chair scrapes on the ground, and then he is walking away and Steve is letting him.

In the distance, Bucky’s door swings shut. A blanket of tension drops over the house. Steve makes himself breathe deeply.

It is too hot inside; he moves around the room on autopilot, unlatching all the windows. When he sees a stray cobweb in the corner nearest the refrigerator, he sweeps at it absently with a broom, then keeps going until the entire kitchen is clean. Then he does the den, and then the living room, and then he goes to bed.

 

 

The next morning, Bucky joins him in the kitchen looking very normal in a sweater that has started to fray at the ends of the sleeves and Steve is careful not to stare at him. He directs his attention to the newspaper in his hands, forces himself to read. He was not prepared for this, he thinks. He did not expect this. It is too soon.

“Good morning,” Steve says experimentally.

Bucky’s tone is indecipherable. “Morning."

Bucky has been here long enough now that he knows where everything is in the kitchen. Steve watches from the table as he moves around the cabinets, collecting a bowl, spoon, milk, corn flakes, blueberries. His heart is a small, clenching fist. He tries to focus on the paper in front of him. The article is about gentrification.

Bucky takes a seat in front of him, looking wary. Steve keeps his eyes on the newspaper, but in his periphery he can see Bucky pouring milk into the waiting bowl, adding blueberries, loading it up with cereal. Bucky glances at Steve before he begins to eat. The spoon glints in his flesh hand, catching the sunlight as it moves.

Steve is holding the newspaper too tightly; it’s gone all crumpled where his hands twisted into the paper. The air feels dense, hard to breathe. He stares down, folding the paper back along the creases, neat and precise; he realizes he is hungry too. When he gets up to go wash some apples, Bucky stops eating and goes still.

“You don’t have to leave,” Bucky says, looking up.

“It—that’s not,” Steve says. “I’m going to wash some apples.”

Bucky looks uncomfortable. “Oh,” he says.

Steve takes a long time at the sink, his back to Bucky and face hot. It has been a long time since he has been made to feel like this, like a child. He has never been the type to keep things bottled in but he holds his mouth in a pressed line now, feeling something hot and writhing protest in his stomach. He focuses on the water rushing over his hands. The sheen of the apples he had gotten from the farmer’s market.

Bucky finishes his breakfast and moves over to the sink, hovering near Steve for a long, uncertain moment before he stows his bowl and spoon in the dishwasher. He is careful not to touch him. The understanding cuts into Steve.

When Bucky walks out, Steve does not follow him.

Slowly, he turns off the running water and eats both apples standing over the sink, the skin crunching between his teeth. He drops the cores in his compost box and takes a measured breath.

Then, he rolls up his sleeves and gets to work cleaning the house. The floors are already swept, so he wipes down every surface and launders all the couch cushions. He even manages to wrangle out the carpet steamer and work out the wine stain under the ottoman that Sam had left the last time he was here. It is good, satisfying work that occupies him and if it feels a little backwards to be luxuriating in the task of uncluttering, he takes pleasure in it anyway.

 

 

In the end, Steve manages to last maybe half the afternoon before he finds himself in front of Bucky’s room, staring at the solid and unrelenting door. He wonders what Bucky does when he is alone. He hates that he doesn't know.

“Bucky,” he says. The words claw their way out of him; he cannot control them. "Can we talk?”

He has been trying for patience; he has failed. He has been trying for two long and difficult months, but it has been drained out of him now. He wants answers, he wants reconciliation, he wants. He wants.

The door opens and Bucky is there on the other side of it, looking tired and faintly puzzled.

“Steve,” he says.

“I know you said you wanted your space,” Steve blurts. “I just.”

Bucky waits for him to gather himself. He does not invite Steve in. He stands very still.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, studying Bucky’s face. “I’m really sorry. Can we talk about it?”

Bucky sighs, and the sound of it is like ground glass. “Steve,” he says, looking straight at him. “You don’t even know what you’re apologizing for.”

“That’s not true,” he says automatically.

Bucky is frowning now, a small Y forming in his brow.

“I mean,” Steve says, fumbling. “Yes, you’re right. I don’t understand all of it. But I want you to feel—safe, here. I don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”

Bucky is still frowning. Steve fights the urge to reach out to him.

“I’ve been making things harder for you," he says, and now that he has voiced the admission, a boulder settles in his throat. He has said it out loud and now it is real, he thinks. Bucky shifts a little in the doorway, like he's settling into his position.

“Yes. No.” Bucky sighs again. “It’s—hard to explain,” he says.

Bucky looks unhappy, and Steve doesn’t know what to do with the knowledge that he is the one who put that look on Bucky’s face. He has spent months adjusting to the newness of Steve-and-Bucky-again, stringing himself between Bucky’s sudden and gentle smiles. He has spent himself in the task of rebuilding, exulting in the work that is securing the happiness of Bucky Barnes.

“If you want me to leave, I can,” he says now, feeling like he is fracturing apart with the effort it takes to say the words.

Bucky swallows.

Then—

“No,” he says, opening the door a little wider. He is not smiling, but Steve's stomach flips anyway. “You don’t have to leave.”

 

* * *

  _Bucky_

Bucky has never invited Steve into his room.

It is a strange thought. This is Steve’s house. But he has not been in this room while Bucky has lived in it. Steve walks in, looking around and nodding appreciatively like it is the first time he’s seeing it. Bucky has moved around some of the furniture and angled his bed toward the window so it catches more sunlight. Nothing is in the neat 90-degree angles that delineated this room before he got in it. He fidgets a little, but Steve doesn’t comment on the rearrangements and sits down on his bed instead.

They watch a baking competition on the televion. It is Steve’s favorite; he remembers. The winning baker puts 50 meringues on a cake that looked perfectly fine without them and walks away with ten thousand dollars. They don’t speak during the show, but Bucky has watched enough episodes of this with Steve that he can imagine his commentary: _I could never eat that. This is art. Buck, did you see that?_

Bucky sits back near the headboard and Steve perches near the end of the bed, so Bucky spends most of the hour looking at Steve’s ludicrously broad back. Steve’s breath is even, slow, controlled.

It is good to be near him, even if they are stuck in this strange and tangled state. He does not remember when he stopped knowing how to be apart from this man. He thinks about how he asked for his space and hates this weakness, this willingness to bend if it means closeness with the man named Steve Rogers.

When the show is over, Steve turns around and gives Bucky a small smile that makes all the sharp edges in Bucky thaw for an instant before hardening again.

Then he walks out and makes them pasta for lunch. They don’t talk much during lunch either, but after that Steve reads in the living room and Bucky joins him there. They share a couch and a bag of potato chips. Steve wipes his fingers on his pants. He will never get used to that, Bucky thinks.

 

 

Days pass.

The argument hangs between them, a frost denseness that stymies Steve’s attempts at light-hearted conversation. He can see it in Steve’s face, how badly he wants to mend what has changed between them. How badly he wants to comprehend. For a few days Bucky exhausts himself trying to put into words an explanation that will make Steve understand, but Steve doesn’t try again to drag a confrontation out of him so he stops trying and things gets easier after that.

Bucky cannot quite put words to it, this visceral relief at being by Steve’s side. It is a slotting together in the base of his chest, a peculiar warmth rendered in stillness. Steve looks at him like he is the only thing worth looking at; he finds himself softening toward the idea instead of bristling. They are bodies orbiting around each other, always in reach. He thinks about what it means to belong, and begins to understand.

Fall crystallizes into winter and they stay inside, reading by lamplight or stretched out on the rugs in front of the fireplace. Bucky spends a lot of time in front of the windows, watching the snow rage in thick flurries outside while curled around a mug of tea. Steve keeps soup bubbling on the stove at all times and brings Bucky blankets.

It is easier to be near him than it is not to. The words will come later, he thinks.

 

 

It happens on a Thursday night in the thick of winter: an unconscious Steve gets dropped off by Sam Wilson after a mission goes wrong and Bucky feels like he is a jagged edge, the way his blood stutters and his breathing clamps up in his throat at the sight of them.

Sam Wilson stumbles across their porch with Steve’s right arm slung around his shoulders, faltering under the weight so that Steve’s feet drag a little. Steve’s leg has been splinted and his shoulder looks all wrong; his skin is a constellation of bruises, splashed blue and black. He is bleeding through his clothes. Bucky feels every nerve in his body go taut; he is incandescent with rage, he feels a snarl building in the base of his throat. He is seconds away from leaping at this man who has brought Steve to him in this state.

Then: “Bucky,” Steve gasps, and lifts his head. “Easy.”

So he’s conscious. Bucky allows Sam Wilson entry into their home and takes Steve from him, supporting him across the kitchen and levering him down onto the futon in the living room. Steve groans, then gasps; the sound of it makes Bucky's stomach contort.

“What. Happened.” He is sweating. His voice is raw, strained.

Sam explains to him in quick, terse words that they were ambushed while overseas, that he needs to leave again to salvage the mission. He explains that a medic has seen Steve on the way to the safehouse and taken care of the worst of his injuries, but his abdominal wound will need redressing. He says, hey, stay with me, Barnes. He says, you can do that, right?

“What—I—”

“I need to go, like, _an hour ago_ ,” Sam grits. “ _Can you do this._ ”

“Yes,” Bucky says, because. If he doesn't. Steve will suffer for it. “Yes.”

So Sam leaves, but not without putting a hand on a shoulder and a quick, “Good. It’s good to see you, man.”

The door slams shut behind him and then the aircraft rotor accelerates with a sound like gunshots; too soon, the sound of the aircraft becomes distant as it leaves the clearing and Bucky’s attention swivels back to Steve.

Steve’s breathing has gone shallow, and there are two spots of fever-red on his cheeks. Bucky fights the wave of panic threatening to overcome him and defeats it. He moves on auto pilot, collecting medical supplies from the drawer Steve had shown him when he first moved in. Disinfectant, dressing pad, saline, gauze, tape. He does not know how he is remembering this, but is desperately, pathetically grateful that the knowledge it there for his using. When he kneels down at Steve’s side, his pulse is a pounding rush in his ears. Steve opens his eyes when he begins to peel back his shirt, sticky with blood.

“Buck,” he says, voice thin.

“Be quiet,” Bucky orders. “This is going to hurt.”

Steve passes out the moment Bucky pours disinfectant over his wound. There is a heart-stopping moment in which Bucky wonders if he has died, and then he checks to see if Steve is still breathing (he is) and forces himself to focus. He works in tight-jawed silence after that, his whole body shaking but his metal hand mercifully still. It is almost midnight by the time Bucky finishes cleaning off the blood from the rest of Steve’s body.

When he gets to his feet, the blood rushes back into his legs and he sways a little. He is hurting. He is not the one who’s been injured, but he is hurting. His chest. He ignores it and studies his handiwork: the binding isn’t as neat as what the medic on the plane did but the dressing is clean now, which is the important thing.

“I’m going to move you to the bed now,” he says a little uselessly. Steve doesn’t respond.

He manages to get Steve into his bedroom without incident; for such a large man, Steve is surprisingly easy to gather into his arms and deposit onto the mattress. Then, he leaves to collect the items he needs—thermometer, water jug, towels, first aid kit—and settles next to Steve on the bed, sitting against the backboard. For hours after, he watches Steve, switching out the wet cloth on his forehead when it becomes too hot. He studies the bruises on his face, already half-healed. If he squints, they look like peonies. 

Steve comes to sometime before dawn, groaning softly. “What happened,” he mumbles.

“Bad mission,” Bucky tells him. “Go back to sleep.”

Steve obeys and doesn’t ask him any more questions, lying on the bed quiet and feverish; he wakes up again in the morning to throw up into a nearby trash can and curls on his side afterward, skin the wrong color. Bucky doesn’t know what to do. He cleans out the trash can and brings in a basin. He changes the cloth on Steve’s forehead. He brings Steve bottles of Gatorade and Steve pushes them away, shaking his head. A long, pale smear of a memory: Bucky leaning over a much smaller Steve, hands tucked into his armpits and waiting for Steve's mother to come home after work. A tongue of fear slips into the base of his stomach. He knows this feeling, he realizes.

“I don’t like this,” Bucky says. "I don't like this," again.

 

 

In the late afternoon, the fever breaks and Steve’s breathing stops sounding so reedy. Bucky is in the middle of deciding whether or not he should text Sam an update when Steve blinks himself awake. He is weak, Bucky thinks, and feels a dam of relief breaking to pieces inside of him. But he is going to be fine. When Steve gives him a shaky thumbs up, the bruise that stretches from collarbone to collarbone changes shape. The thought of it sends a pang through Bucky. He wonders how long they will have to wait before it is wiped clean from the canvas of Steve’s skin. Steve looks at him, eyes serious; when Bucky hands him a cup of water, he drinks it down without comment.

“Thanks, Buck,” Steve says, smiling at Bucky tiredly.

“How are you feeling,” Bucky says.

“Fine.”

Bucky stares at him.

“Okay, not fine,” Steve amends, letting out a breath of laughter. “Doing better, though.”

“Good,” Bucky says, and then it is—too much, suddenly.

He needs to leave. He hears himself say something about making them some dinner before his legs take him across and out of the room. His chest is heavy, achy, hot. A lancing pain persists. It is the weight of being responsible for another human being, he thinks, and then wonders if Steve has felt this all this time.

He spends a whole hour in the kitchen trying to make chicken and dumpling soup the way Steve does, but he does not remember all the herbs that Steve likes to use. The spice rack contains a row of too many small, glass jars; he tastes a few that look like they could be right and adds them to the pot.

It turns out a little watery and wrong-tasting, but when he takes a bowl of it to Steve, his face does that thing where it crumples a little.

Steve eats the entire bowl and asks for more; Bucky walks out to the kitchen, feeling a sharp sweetness swell beneath his skin.

When he comes back, Steve has fallen back asleep, hair sticking to the sweat on his forehead. His face is unstrained, free in sleep. He looks absurdly young, Bucky thinks. Fragile. Bucky stands there watching him for a long time, then moves his hair away from his face.

“Good,” he says, voice low so it won’t wake him. Then he folds himself onto a corner of the bed and lets sleep, at length, pull him under.


	5. Chapter 5

_Steve_

For days after, Bucky stays very close to Steve. He is vigilant, wary. A constant. When Steve tells Bucky he doesn’t need to worry anymore, Bucky stares at him and doesn't say a word. He has been doing that a lot lately—watching Steve intently, without ceasing. Steve spends a lot of time trying to shake off the feeling of being under constant observation and figure out how he might placate Bucky.

Bucky keeps making him soup and the sight of him standing there in front of the stove with his arms crossed, tending the pot, makes Steve’s chest ache a little. Bucky’s attempts at cooking are improving at a remarkable rate; already, Steve prefers his potato leek to his own. When he tells him so, Bucky looks surprised and nods a little jerkily. Thanks, he says.

To the untrained eye, they slip back into their routine, sharing meals and spending long stretches of time in the living room together. Bucky doesn’t say very much; Steve thinks about how words have been in short supply around the house since the argument and wants to strike something.

Still, he can tell: something has changed. All the time now, Bucky is tense and discomfited. It is in the slant of his shoulders, the way he stands staring out of the window for hours at a time. He does not ask to go on walks with Steve anymore. Once, Steve works out in the living room and Bucky watches him the whole time, mouth pressed thin.

He does not know how to be around Bucky anymore, Steve thinks. The thought is a cloying knot in the pit of his stomach. But Bucky anchors himself to the edges of Steve’s perception, still and quiet and wearing clothes that run too big on him. Bucky does not leave him, so he persists.

 

 

Bucky is the one to break their holding pattern.

They are watching a film side-by-side on the big couch, Bucky’s legs curled beneath him the way Steve has learned he likes to sit. The movie is about a bank heist; Bucky picked it out. Steve can see his face out of the corner of his eye, a pale oval washed out by the light of the screen.

Near the climax of the movie, Bucky says, “Steve.” When Steve looks over, Bucky’s eyes are trained ramrod-straight at the screen.

He is in the middle of working out if he has imagined it when Bucky takes a measured breath and says, “This is not working.”

All the ragged edges in Steve jerk at once.

“How do I fix it,” Bucky says. He still isn’t looking at Steve.

“Bucky,” Steve murmurs. 

Bucky’s expression is a thunderclap of unhappiness. “It was easier,” he says, “before.”

“You’ve been through a lot. We’re still adjusting.”

Bucky presses his mouth closed at this, so Steve cautiously, very slowly moves his hand until it is resting on Bucky’s knee. It is enough to pull Bucky’s gaze from the television at last; Bucky jerks, then stares at the hand like he cannot believe that it is there. He does not pull away from the touch. His fingers flutter, then lie still in his lap.

“It was easier before,” Bucky repeats, softly. “I don’t understand why—it's like this now.”

Steve doesn’t know what to say. “Have I been making things worse?”

“It’s not you who’s the problem,” Bucky says, mouth twisting with bitterness.

“It’s not your fault,” Steve says automatically. Maybe it is too quick; Bucky shifts his knee out of his grip and Steve wants to kick himself.

“I would like,” Bucky says. He wets his lips. “Not to feel.”

“Oh, Buck,” Steve breathes. "That's not."

He cannot help the way a half-gasp escapes him, a lancing, acute pain; then, Bucky turns his head and looks straight at Steve. The sight is arresting. His eyes are luminous and huge, caught in the light coming off the television.

“When Sam Wilson dropped you off—”

Bucky breathes sharply. His expression is terrible. “I don’t want to feel—that—again.”

“I didn’t want to put you in that position,” Steve says, helpless. “Missions haven’t been that bad in months. I’m sorry. I'm really sorry.”

“The idea of losing this,” Bucky says. “You.”

Bucky closes his eyes. “Do you understand,” he says softly.

At this, the ground shifts away from Steve’s feet. The question hollows him out: _do you understand_. Steve thinks about the years he spent mourning Bucky, the way grief flipped him inside-out and saturated every penetrable corner of his still-new body. The way every lap he had run around the track since then felt like a punishing penance, even after he knew Bucky was out there. How it felt to see Bucky there in Wakanda, blinking up at him from T’Challa’s armchair.

“Yes,” he whispers.

Bucky closes his eyes. He is shaking. Steve thinks he may be shaking, too. The robbers in the movie are in a shoot-out. A spray of bullets fills the screen.

“When you were—lying there,” Bucky says, words coming stilted and halting. “It felt so stupid—that argument.”

Steve’s heartbeat is a rush in his ears; it is the first time either of them has brought it up since the day after the conversation. The frown lines on Bucky’s face have gone deep, scored into the smooth plane of his forehead. Steve wonders how long Bucky has been thinking about this; how long it has taken for him to bring these words to the surface. He imagines reaching out, placing a careful hand on Bucky’s cheek. He doesn't move.

“Just,” Bucky says. “I wanted to be.”

Bucky is quiet for a long time after that, enough for the action on the screen to subside. His jaw works silently; his hands are tight in his lap.

“Enough,” he scrapes out, small-sounding.

The last of Steve’s breath wrings out of his chest. He understands. He understands. He had been thinking of Bucky in the past tense. He had been treating Bucky the way he assumed he would want to be treated; he had presumed, in his arrogance, that he had understood. The knowledge chokes him now, dragging against his throat sharp and hot. He thinks about his best friend Bucky Barnes, the last cord tethering him home. He breathes.

He thinks, I will feel this loss always. He thinks, I am okay with that. The truth of it is grounds him.

“Oh, _Buck_ ,” he says. His voice cracks straight down the middle. “You are. You are.”

And this, this is what he will remember later: when he reaches out to Bucky this time, Bucky lets him and it is a glory of mending, a rush of light; it is, he realizes as his blood thrills, what he has been thirsting for all this time. Bucky goes limp where Steve gathers him and stays there, breath hot against Steve’s collarbones—stays.

 

* * *

_Bucky_

Every door inside him shutters wide open when Steve tells him it is enough; the triumph and agony of it expose him raw. He has never felt so human, he thinks.

Steve pulls him close and holds him like Bucky has seen mothers on the street hold their children. He is so gentle in his movements, all tenderness. He is crying. Bucky can tell because of the way his chest stutters beneath Bucky’s chin. Bucky allows himself to marvel at the warmth of this man, the heat that passes from Steve’s body to his.

Steve apologizes to him, over and over; Bucky experiences the peculiar feeling of being out of words. He is empty now, spent. He has never known exhaustion like this; it is foreign, all-consuming. He settles into the warmth of Steve Rogers and rests, quiet.

After a while, Steve places a trembling hand into Bucky’s hair and leaves it there, sifting absently through the strands. Bucky closes his eyes and lets himself sink into a swell of contentment so complete he wants for nothing. Reaching up sightless, he takes Steve’s hand and holds it to his own cheek, very careful; Steve lets out a shaky-sounding breath and goes still.

They stay that way for a long time.

 

 

It is still dark the next morning when Bucky wakes up feeling stretched and unmade.

Steve will not be awake for a while, so he draws a deep, luxurious bath with the water scalding hot and sits in it for well over an hour, adding more hot water when the temperature goes down the way Steve taught him to. It feels good, to work the soap into his hair. And the softness of his own skin still surprises him every time. He studies his fingerprints, toys with the notion that he is singular. Unique.

When he steps out, his skin is pink and clean. He dresses in a sweater and a pair of flannel trousers. The fabric lies flat and soft against his scrubbed skin.

Then he sits on the bed, studying his possessions. When Steve first brought him here, he could fit all of his possessions into his pockets. Cell phone, baseball cap, pencil pouch, notebook. Now he has things that Steve has given him. They will not fit in his pockets. A wardrobe full of clothes. Books. Blankets. Cologne that smells like Steve. A camera that he still has trouble using. It is strange, to have objects that tie him to this place. Proof that he walked and lived in this house with the windows in every room.

The notebook—he will give it to Steve, he decides impulsively. He has no need for it anymore. And it will mean something to Steve, this last piece of evidence proving the existence of the Bucky Barnes that was.

He pockets it just as he hears the sound of footsteps distantly heading down the stairs. Ah, he thinks.

 

 

When he joins Steve in the living room, Steve turns and gives Bucky a smile, small and beautiful. Bucky’s breath tumbles out of him at the sight of it.

“Bucky, hi,” Steve says.

Bucky moves until he is standing next to him by the big window. Their shoulders press together. This tractable man, this man who sets such store in kindness. He will stand by this man always, he thinks.

They stay there, quiet for a time. Outside it is clean and white; another few inches of snow have fallen sometime during the night. The bark on some of the trees is worn away. He remembers how Steve told him once they had some deer in the forest.

He steels his nerves. Presses into the strength he has begun the task of rebuilding.

“Steve,” he says. He takes Steve’s hand and places the notebook in it. “I want you to have this.”

Steve’s breath goes very quiet. Bucky does not look at him; he focuses on a spot of red twinkling in and out of the branches outside—a small bird. In a few months there will be more of them, but for now. It is good to see it. The fact that it is here means that spring is coming.

In the reflection of the window, Steve’s eyes are wide and stunned. Bucky steals a glance and sees Steve’s mouth working noiselessly. Emotions crash through his face, too fast to name. He has always been over-expressive, Bucky thinks.

The bird vanishes from sight—probably into the hollow of a tree. Bucky wonders if Steve will agree to going on a walk later in the day. It has been a while since they have done that. In the window’s reflection, Bucky sees Steve bow his head, the motion so small that Bucky almost misses it.

Then, there is a warm pressure on his elbow and Bucky lets Steve’s hand turn him gently so they are looking at each other. Steve's eyes are shafts of blue, lancing deep. He is shaking his head.

“No,” he says, smile wistful. His movements are slow and deliberate. He tucks the book back into Bucky’s arms. Holds Bucky’s hand in his own large, warm one.

“I don’t want it,” Steve continues. The words drive deep into Bucky and hold him up, sustain him. “It’s yours to do what you like with.”

Bucky swallows and feels something slot together in his sternum, hard. The feeling is different from anything that he has experienced—it thrums, solid with permanence. After a beat, Steve leads him into the kitchen with a gentle hand saying something about trying out a recipe for cranberry preserves; Bucky allows himself to be moved.

He is smiling, he thinks. He is happy.

He is _._

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I'm [on tumblr](http://tippetippet.tumblr.com); come say hi!


End file.
